Bryan and Jeff’s Mac and iPad Text Editor Showdown

So the thing is, when I'm at home, when I'm at my desk in my office, I sit at my desk and I use my Mac for my writing.

Right.

Okay.

So I need to have something that gives me a seamless process of going between writing on my Mac and writing on my iPad.

And I've run through a bunch of different tools trying to find the right thing for that.

And the tools that I had settled on at various points were IA Writer and Ulysses.

And most recently I've been using Ulysses because there's the iPad app and the Mac app.

And...

But the problem is that if I'm writing in Ulysses, after I get over about 450 words on my iPad, and keep in mind, this is an M5 iPad Pro, it gets very sluggish.

Yeah, so what's the issue there, do you think?

I think there's just something in the way it's been coded.

So, yeah.

But, anyhow.

Then, once I open Ulysses on my Mac, that's not where I'm going to write.

So, then I copy the content out, put it into BBEdit, where I write.

Good lord.

Stone knives and bearskins, man.

That's...

That's outrageous in 2026.

Exactly.

So what I needed was something that actually worked much more transparently.

Also, I'm not comfortable with the idea of having all of this stuff that I write locked into a proprietary format.

Yeah.

It should all be text so that it doesn't matter what I use on any platform.

I can just open the documents.